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Road to New York
|} The Road to New York was the commonly used term in World War Z to describe the United States' campaign to take the offensive against the zombies and drive them out of the eastern two-thirds of the country. During the Great Panic, the remnants of the US military had fled west of the Rocky Mountains to establish a Safe Zone on the west coast. After 7 years, a functioning economy had been rebuilt and a new model army had been trained to defeat the zombie hordes. This new army was first tested at the Battle of Hope in New Mexico. Overview Following the Honolulu Conference, the United States announced that it would go on "permanent offensive" against the zombies. Some other nations argued that they should simply wait for the zombies to rot to pieces (some of the older specimens were already showing signs of decay) over the course of years or even decades. But the US president determined that in order to restore the dignity and pride of humanity, they had to retake the world from the zombies by force and destroy them. Thus began a three year campaign driving eastwards from the Rocky Mountains, across the Great Plains and Mississippi basin then over the Appalachian Mountains to the Atlantic Coast. The campaign consisted of two lines of infantry stretched north to south across the country in one unbroken line. The line slowly advanced eastward, carefully clearing out any zombies and using sniffer dogs to find immobilized but still active zombies (who could start up the plague cycle all over again). Canada and Mexico were too weak to liberate their own countries (in Canada's case due to its vast size, in Mexico's case from all of the zombie hordes pouring north from Central America) so their remaining military units were focused on securing their borders with the USA from zombies to enable the sweep eastward. The plan was that after the US was liberated, they would then help liberate Mexico and Canada. When the line encountered heavy resistance segments would break off, advance, and destroy a large target: specifically the hordes of sometimes millions of zombies clustered around pockets of survivors that were maintained as zombie-bait (to distract them from heading to the west coast Safe Zone) and supplied by air. "Major battles" of the campaign tended to consist of when the army encountered such hordes, or in the dense urban combat of clearing out major cities. The army was divided into three groups: Army Group North, Army Group Center, and Army Group South. Major Battles against the zombies Actual pitched "battles" occurred when major hordes of zombies were encountered, swarming around pockets of survivors. These swarms could number in the millions. Ironically, the battles were actually the easy part of the campaign, relatively speaking, as they consisted of large numbers of zombies being efficiently destroyed by ordered groups of soldiers as they walked straight towards them. The dangerous part of the campaign was clearing literally every foot of the country from the zombies, running the danger of being caught unawares while clearing houses or zombies buried under snow. Every Night, no matter how secure the soliders felt, the entire army had to halt and fortify their position until dawn. Those in Army Group North actually had a harder time during winter than would be expected: Zombies, though not dangerous while frozen, are also difficult to find in the snow, and every spring soliders always had to face rear attacks from several thawed Gs they had missed in areas that they had thought cleared. As Todd Waino described, the troops in the South were lucky, as once they cleared an area, it stayed cleared. Cities were a nightmare, mostly due to urban sprawl. It'd take weeks before the military could even form a defensive quarrentine perimeter. And zombies were not the only threat the troops would face. Major Battles against secessionists During the height of the Great Panic, even within the Safe Zone on the west coast there were many problems with secessionists. Some were crazed religious fundamentalists (Fundies) or on the other end, crazed environmentalist cults that saw the zombie plague as nature's judgement (Greenies); these were always more of a nuissance than a real threat. The big problem during the first shakey year trying to stabilize the Safe Zone was that several secessionist groups tried to fight the government. Some of them were reacting to the zombie epidemic and thinking they were better off on their own; some were crazed survivalists that had been planning something like this for years (in the event of nuclear war, etc.) and just used the zombie epidemic as a convenient excuse. All agreed that these were simply crazed secessionists trying to set themselves up as bandit-kings in the face of the chaos and anarchy of the time, and the response to them was obvious: they were enemies of the country and were dealt with without hesitation. The morally complicated issue were those secessionists east of the Rockies. The US had proportionately more pockets of survivors in the infected zones than any other country: this is explained as in-part due to the high rate of private firearm ownership in the USA, and also due to the independent spirit fostered by Americans. Some of these were just small one or two man holdouts, or one or two family forts, but there were also many pockets of several hundred or even several thousand refugees were able to survive for seven years supplied only by air, if at all. Many of these pockets of survivors were still fiercely loyal and welcomed incoming soldiers. However, some of the large pockets of survivors felt completely embittered, and actively tried to secede from the United States, resisting advancing army groups with lethal force. They said, with some justification, that "we didn't abandon the USA, the USA abandoned us". They felt that the disastrous government response to the initial zombie outbreak had doomed millions of people, and that the subsequent retreat behind the Rockies (even if it was necessary, after the defeat at Yonkers) had left them for dead. Usually this was just one or two people, nicknamed "LMOE's" (pronounced "Lay-moh": LAst Man On Earth") who had gotten so used to living like kings of their little forts in skyscrapers that they refused to come down. At worst, these were organized and armed gangs, such as those that controlled the Sears Tower in Chicago and had to be cleared with lethal force. But some of the large pockets of survivors, organized into actual communities, still actively tried to secede. The largest of these was the group of several thousand survivors that maintained their own defense perimeter in the Black Hills of South Dakota. They had resisted the zombies for 7 years, but felt that the US had abandoned them to die when the zombies took over, and they did not want to be part of the US anymore. This was one of the few times that actual tanks and military combat vehicles were used in the campaign; but the regular army was not used to fight secessionists. Separate units dealt with human secessionists, not the three army groups. Other Hazards Feral Humans are human children whose parents were killed by zombies or for some other reason. The children grew up in the wild,living and reacting to humans like animals. Special HR (Human Reclamation) teams had to be called in to tranquilize them so they could be rehabilitated. But,as Todd Wainio said "If a feral 300-lb bull is charging at you,a couple tranqs aint gonna stop it." Feral animals are just packs of abandoned dogs, and they can also be rehabilitated. Feral cats, however hide and then attack when the soldiers weapon is down. The reason the dogs were so easy is because naturally, dogs are social animals. Quislings are people who try to appease the zombies by acting like them, and if you want to know more check the above link. Diseases are just like they have always been, but because of diseases we thought were extinct in the pre-war world, they came back during the war and post-war. They caused hundreds of thousands of deaths,and Todd Wainio said that an entire platoon had to be quarantined because 1 got sick with cholera. Booby traps are landmines left behind to blow up the zombies as the army fled to the safezone. However, it made the Army Groups suffer more casualties. They had no maps of where the mines were, and plus the zombies that did step on them became Crawlers, which were twice as dangerous as average zombies because they crawl on the ground and are harder to spot. Weakened buildings were another problem, either weakened from fire and vandalisim during the Great Panic, or from the years of neglect and ice damage. Sometimes, all that could trigger a collapse was a loud noise, like a gunshot. Z-Shock Aftermath US casualties in the war were reported to be relatively moderate. Relatively as in comparison to the massive, apocalyptic losses that China and Russia took during the war. Losses were still heavy. After reaching the Atlantic coast, it was decided that as much had been asked of the soldiers as could reasonably be asked, and "Victory" was declared ("VA Day") ten years after the zombie epidemic began. However, a new all-volunteer UN multinational force was put together to clear the rest of the world of zombies, first Canada and Mexico. Many volunteered, either because they believed in liberating the entire world, revenge on Zack, or simply because they didn't know how to go back to civilian life anymore. Within two years, all major nations had been cleared of zombies, finishing with China. "Victory in China" day, 12 years after the zombie outbreak began, is usually held to be "the end" of the war, or at least major combat operations. But zombies remain in the "White Zones" of the frozen north or mountains, where they thaw out every spring, and in the oceans.